VBS. Dewald van Rensburg
would have four directors: Mabilu, Matodzi and two of the king’s representatives, Paul Makhavhu and royal family member Edward Ramabulana. The king could now veto any decision. ‘They [the VhaVenda Heritage Trust] did not pay for those shares,’ Phalanndwa told me. ‘I was livid.’
Conflicts aside, the two old friends, the king and Mabilu now collectively owned 26 per cent of VBS through Dyambeu, putting them on par with the PIC. Phalanndwa and Matodzi would, however, soon clash again.
The PIC had sent its head of legal, Ernest Nesane, to serve on the bank’s board. According to Phalanndwa, Matodzi immediately tried to co-opt Nesane by giving him some kind of shareholding in Dyambeu. Having Nesane onside would have swung control of the bank in Dyambeu’s direction.
‘So I went to a wedding in the Eastern Cape [and] on a Saturday he [Matodzi] calls me and says, look, he proposed that we buy shares for Ernest,’ Phalanndwa claimed. ‘He said, no, it’s a strategy to manage him [Nesane]. We must give him patronage … A sweetener so that Ernest can push this deal. I said, no, I’m not going to be involved in such a thing. I’m not going to give Ernest anything. One, Ernest is an employee of government, he’s an employee of the PIC. I don’t even know Ernest, I have never met him. I said, no, that’s not going to happen. He [Matodzi] got angry and then he hung up. Then later on he comes back and says, ja, you were right on this issue of Ernest, he has taken it a bit far, he is going to retract.’
Matodzi led the way in assembling the executive team that would turn VBS around. It was decided in 2013 that the bank would recruit Andile Ramavhunga as its new CEO-designate, to be permanently appointed in 2014.
‘Andile, I know him well, for long,’ Phalanndwa told me. ‘I also met Andile on campus; we were all doing accounting. So Andile was the COO of Ithala bank in Durban. He was my friend, not Tshifhiwa’s friend. When Tshifhiwa wanted Andile to come into the bank he spoke to me and I said, well, Andile is a good guy, bring him in.’
In a City Press feature on Ramavhunga in 2017, he told a slightly different story. According to Ramavhunga, he had more of a longstanding relationship with Matodzi. He also claimed that Matodzi had even thought to take over VBS back when they were still students, almost fifteen years before it happened. ‘When we were at RAU, we always spoke about running VBS,’ Ramavhunga said. ‘All he did was remind me of the dream. I initially refused, but he was persistent.’6
As far as Mabilu is concerned, things ran smoothly at first, but they soon started to sour. ‘In 2013 we’re together, 2014 we’re together, coming up with strategies and all these things and getting the PIC to inject more funding,’ he told me. ‘That’s when … we, the board, started having problems with [Matodzi]. What he would do is that we as the board would agree as a collective this is what we are going to do, we need to do this and that and that, and then he would go outside the board and do something [else] … like somebody who can’t work in a collective.’7
Both Mabilu and Phalanndwa recounted how Matodzi would set up important meetings, ostensibly representing Dyambeu, without their knowledge. ‘This was around 2014,’ Mabilu recalled, adding that he realised they were dealing with someone who acted like a psychopath.
Things got so bad that Matodzi was temporarily removed from the Dyambeu board. ‘We took a decision as the board that we are suspending this guy from the activities of Dyambeu, we are removing him,’ Mabilu told me. ‘It was maybe … beginning of 2015.’
Phalanndwa was out of town at the time. ‘I was at Ramavhunga’s wedding,’ he recalled. ‘They suspended [Matodzi] as a director of Dyambeu. I came back and he told me these guys had suspended him, he thinks they are being unfair what what what. Then I wrote to Dyambeu to try and establish the reason. It was explained what he had done. I asked him why did you do this, and then he says he made a mistake and then we left it. But the guys did not budge because it was a properly constituted meeting and they took a decision to suspend him. Then he went to the king.’8
The king in turn went to Mabilu. ‘[The king] requested a meeting with me and then he said to me, no he’s pleading that I must convince the board to reconsider the decision because this guy, he made mistakes,’ Mabilu told me. ‘He [Matodzi] went to see the king and apologise for not working together with the team and all this, he’s not going to do it again. And the king also told me that this guy, sometimes when I don’t have petrol or the tyres are finished the guy would assist me, so please man … The king did not have anything. That’s why Matodzi was able to buy him tyres, he was able to give him money for alcohol, petrol, petty stuff like that.’9
Even though Mphephu Ramabulana was royalty, by all accounts he was not even close to being a wealthy man and trivial financial favours could go a long way. Phalanndwa said that when Matodzi realised Mabilu assisted the king, he ‘decided to assist him more. Then the king fell for the trap.’10
Mabilu caved, and with the king and the king’s representatives in Dyambeu on his side, Matodzi was invited back onto the board. It was the first in a chain of events that would rapidly see Matodzi rise from obscurity to, for all practical purposes, take over the bank. ‘When we brought him back, the guy came back with a plan,’ said Mabilu.11
‘Dyambeu was my baby,’ Matodzi told me. ‘With loans and with how we should structure things, almost immediately there was this vindictive environment. In a bank, believe me, there is politics on a daily basis. Even in the big banks, there is always an issue, but you need to handle that without mistrusting each other.’12
One problem, according to Matodzi, was Mabilu’s ego: ‘Dyambeu was very toxic. Mabilu’s character – it’s a one-man show, and a bank does not need that.’
But the larger problem that hamstrung Dyambeu, Matodzi claims, was that he was the only one who actually understood banking. ‘The rules of banking are very different from the rules of a normal company,’ he said. ‘When you try to explain to them … when you go to Dyambeu to say this is a problem, they don’t understand … That’s where it all started.’
In Matodzi’s version, the deadlock inside Dyambeu made it an ineffectual shareholder, unable to give strategic direction to the bank. ‘We disagreed,’ he said. ‘Nothing was moving, there were personality clashes. In the whole bank, from executives, there was a lot of frustration … there was a lot of divide and rule … you can ask them how many times the Reserve Bank was threatening to shut down the bank.’
Matodzi claims that the bank’s management practically begged him to stage a coup.
That coup began on 24 July 2015 at VBS’s AGM, where it became clear that Matodzi had gone to great lengths to lay the groundwork.
There were a number of VBS board seats to be filled and Dyambeu wanted to bring in new blood. ‘In 2015 we sat as the board [of Dyambeu] and we agreed what must happen,’ Mabilu told me. ‘Who are the people we want to see? We recruited people who have bank experience who will assist us in terms of taking the bank forward. We identified a few names of key people. Matodzi was not part of that [list].’13
Despite the Dyambeu directors having agreed on paper whom to nominate to the board, at the VBS AGM an individual from the general body of shareholders nominated Matodzi, seemingly out of the blue. ‘So when we went there those people there, one of them nominated Matodzi,’ Mabilu recalled. ‘But Matodzi is part of Dyambeu … The logical thing is that he must decline. [He must] make sure that the people we have agreed, all of us as a collective, get in the board. [Instead], he got himself into the board.’
Matodzi’s coup was achieved through simple grass-roots mobilisation before the AGM. He was apparently the motive force behind a grouping called the VBS Shareholders Forum. Phalanndwa explained it to me: ‘So this is how he becomes a director of VBS. He started some forum. This forum is called VBS [Shareholders] Forum, but literally it was just his mouthpiece. They were permanent shareholders, depositors. These guys owned 1 per cent, 2 per cent … there were a lot of them. So he started an organisation.’14
Phalanndwa admits he was partly responsible. The creation of the VBS Shareholders Forum was conceived as a way to outvote the PIC, which had an identical shareholding in VBS to Dyambeu. Phalanndwa